5.2 Hunter Spec Comparisons

There's
been a lot of debate since 5.2 went out regarding which hunter
specialization will be the new supreme choice. Some people say that
Beast Mastery is still the primary single target spec, while Survival
is still the primarily AoE spec, with Marksmanship falling behind
both. Others say that Beast Mastery and Marksman are equal in single
target, while Survival is the best AoE. Still others say that both
Beast Mastery and Marksman pale in comparison to Survival on both
accounts.

In
the first week of raiding, I played a mixed combination of BM, SV and
MM. In the second week of raiding, I only played MM. After this
experience, this is my opinion on the three hunter specs and where
we'll see them go as the tier progresses:

The
first half of the instance is going to largely favour survival, while
the second half of the instance is going to largely favour beast
mastery and marksmanship. As far as I can tell, survival is still the
king for AoE, while they all do similar single target potential
depending on the length and nature of the fight. Anything that's
single target with multiple interruptions or travel time will favour
marksmanship more than beast mastery. However, anything that's single
target that greatly distracts the player without hassling the pet,
such as Durumu, will favour beast mastery more than marksmanship. In
all cases, the standard deviation for performing well favours
survival. The longer the fight, the better marksmanship seems to do.
Marksman is also less forgiving with its cooldowns than Beast Mastery
is for single target, whereby Beast Mastery gives the players more
room to make up for their incorrect whack-a-mole phases.

If
you're an orc, you're probably going to favour beast mastery over
marksmanship. This is especially true of orc engineers. However, a
marksmanship hunter will see huge increases in their damage output
swapping from orc to troll. Therefore, if you're troll, you have the
option of playing beast mastery for single target (more forgiving,
more experience from the rest of the expansion) or playing
marksmanship (less forgiving, harder to pull off). Changing my race
in various sims from orc to troll for MM is an approximate 1.5K
difference, while the opposite is true from troll to orc for BM.

Which
spec is the most effective depends on the nature and objectives of
the fight. Keep in mind that I play 25s, not 10s. The fights are as
follows:

1.
Jin'rokh, a very quick single target encounter.2. Horridon,
primarily an AoE encounter with two single target burns at the
end.3. Council of Elders, a cleave fight with multiple targets
that die one by one.4. Tortos, a single target encounter with
important AoE mechanics.5. Megaera, a single target encounter
with multiple interruptions.6. Ji-Kun, a single target encounter
with important AoE mechanics.7. Durumu, a single target encounter
with a few distracting mechanics.8. Primordius, a multiple target
fight where you will primarily be single target.9. Dark Animus, a
single target encounter revolving around add control.10. Iron
Qon, a single target encounter.11. Twin Consorts, a single target
encounter.12. Lei Shen, a mixed but primarily single target
encounter with a few AoE mechanics.

When
I look through logs for brief analysis', I look for (a) the name and
location of the player, prioritizing US and EU performances; (b)
the DPSe; (c) consistent timestamps. I assume, for 25s, that all
buffs are present and don't nitpick further. I also keep in mind the
number of pages present for parses and how many guilds have killed
the current boss. For example, there is significantly more data and
competition for the first half of the instance than there is the
second half. Therefore, I assume that the standard deviation for the
lesser played specs is going to be larger than the more popular ones,
and thus not entirely accurate representations of the specs
potential. Rather than averaging or using the medium of a set of data
comparisons, I'll eyeball it based on my own knowledge of the
encounter, the spec, and what data is available.

----JIN'ROKH

For
Jin'rokh, it's a complete wash. The nature of the fight means that
luck in your opening rotation plays a large factor. For most people,
the encounter doesn't last longer than four minutes. As a result I
don't even take the fight that seriously. It's a cute introduction to
the tier. All three of the specs, then, are doing roughly the same
amount of damage, given the inherent streaks of the encounter. Even
on heroic, most of the data so far is pretty consistent between the
three specs. For Jin'rokh, I suggest just playing whatever you are
most comfortable at playing. Survival has the least complicated play
style so I imagine most will choose Survival. I'm also slightly
suspicious that the water buff isn't fully transferring to all BM pet
abilities, but I haven't actually looked into it.

HORRIDON

Horridon
has very important AoE segments of the fight, where keeping
adds suppressed is a large factor between winning and
losing. It's also rather long, averaging out at about ten minutes.
You're going to see about a 40k DPS increase using survival over MM
or BM, both of which have similar pieces of data. This is for a few
reasons that are beneficial to the raid:

Most
of the fight is going to be AoE. You can also still focus primary
large adds / dinomancers and lay some thick into them while still
effectively suppressing with said AOE.

Only
the last few minutes of the fight is a single target burn, and a
short single target burn is the best kind of single target burn for
SV.

If
you're playing as marksman or BM, chances are you'll be focusing on
Horridon more than the adds. A beast master would either leave his
pet on Horridon, to avoid all the downtime of running around and
to whittle the dino, OR would bring his pet into the AoE
conundrum to help beast cleave. Either way, you're just straight up
going to see more contribution laying on some real AoE with Survival.
When I did this fight as Marksman, I did a lot of target swapping,
focusing most of my single target into Horridon as he gained more
cracked shell debuffs while balancing my AoE when I thought I'd get
the most time efficiency out of bombardment. If bombardment is
constantly going to be dropping because it's less throughput to use
multishot until 5 seconds in the future, it just doesn't seem worth
it. Definitely recommend only SV for Horridon.

COUNCIL
OF ELDERS

This
is a cleave fight with multiple targets, and it's not particularly
important that they all die at once. Whenever you have multiple
targets you're going to see more throughput by speccing into
Survival. Once again, the same holds true here, and with one of the
cleave targets also summoning adds, it's pretty much the same no
brainer regarding Survival and the other specs. We can't even really
help contribute to single targeting Kazra'jin, since other classes
will do single target focus far better than any of our specs will
while depending on a moving pet as any sort of damage input. Cleaving
with survival and AoEing the sand adds is the way to go.

One
note I hadn't mentioned before, Master's Call can get you out of a
sand trap.

TORTOS

Tortos
is interesting because you would assume that, even though he summons
adds, it would be a hunters primary contribution to single down the
boss. It's the opposite, however, since Tortos will only really be
taking damage when he is afflicted by Shell Concussion. Any other
time during the fight, you will be single target/cleaving down whirl
turtles or AoEing bats.

For
the most part, ranged will be set to turtles and melee on bats, but
it's rather important to make sure those bats go to melee in the
first place. They spawn from the roof, which can make them difficult
for a tank to pick up prior to them getting healing aggro from
multiple points in the room. It's also important that the bats die
before the stomp, so the melee can actually escape from falling
rocks.

Therefore
the progress of Tortos is going to be primarily cleave/AoE with brief
periods of focused single target. This is still going to benefit
Survival, allowing you to misdirect and unload onto bats when they
spawn and to help get them down low with survivals great AoE burst.

You'll
also have plenty of opportunities to cleave each of the turtles, or
onto the boss from the turtles.

----

The
first four bosses of the tier, for the most part, highly favour
survival. This is why you see the general consensus that survival is
the new best spec for hunters, regardless of the situation. This is
sort of true - from what I can tell, survival is just the best spec
for AoE by a land slide. Yet it can still keep up on single target,
thus making it the most effective choice for *throughput only* in
multiple target encounters. An experienced player should still see a
single target damage increase playing as beast mastery or
marksmanship. As I said before, in terms of difficulty and
forgiveness, I feel the specs rank Survival > Beast Mastery >
Marksmanship. So if you're not confident with your Marksman abilities
or fight foresight, or you never really took to the whack-a-mole
nature of Beast Mastery, Survival is going to be your
friend. Nonetheless any hunter looking to push their DPSe
in the first third of ToT is going to be looking at Survival. I'm
actually a little disappointed in this, since I find survival to be
the driest to play, especially after the black arrow proc rate
increase.

The
next two thirds of ToT, as there are eight more bosses, may change
that prioritization.

After
Tortos is Megaera, Ji-Kun, Durumu and Primordius. Of these four, only
Ji-Kun and Primordius involve significant importance of other adds
besides the boss, and in Primordius' case most involvement is still
going to be single target beyond padding for numbers (or some weird
AoE kiting strategy).

MEGAERA

I
like Megaera. In terms of fight progression, it feels like doing
Jin'rokh several times over and over in waves of three. This is
annoying and invasive for a rotation, which can throw off a marksman.
It also requires a lot of running around for the pet, which can throw
off a beast master. Its simplicity doesn't really bother the
survivalist. Therefore, I found most of the three specs performing
relatively equally. For the timestamps I was looking at, they all
hovered around 110K.

The
marksman will find Megaera more unforgiving than usual, since their
cooldowns can line up inappropriately and the Careful Aim phase -
while repeating - doesn't last long enough to give the benefit it
usually does.

Beast
Mastery will be inconvenienced by the running around of the pet each
rampage phase, but for the most part this isn't a huge deal and won't
be such a huge detriment as it will be to marksmen. Both marksmanship
and Beast Mastery have the ability to lay down traps during each
intermission when they're standing around with no targets. Survival
won't want to do this, though, since it will put black arrow on
cooldown.

My
suggestion, again, is to play whichever spec you're more comfortable
with. However, between the two specs I consider as single target, I'd
suggest beast mastery as being the more effective. Most people, I
imagine, will decide to continue playing as Survival. I will probably
use Marksmanship for heroic, but we'll see when we get there.

JI-KUN

Ji-Kun
is a disaster for Beast Mastery. Not only does your pet tend to
despawn when jumping around to the platforms, they also don't appear
to benefit fully from primal nutriment buffs. They also cannot help
you if your juveniles fly away and you need to chase after them in
the air.

Since
you are AoEing platforms of hatchlings, people are once again
favouring Survival for its superior AoE. This is completely valid and
entirely true. Making sure your hatchlings die is imperative for this
fight. I will point out, though, that the majority of the fight does
not include AoE and that players with similar primal nutriment buffs,
playing survival and marksmanship, are only about 20K apart. The main
difference here giving survival better numbers is the moments you are
AoEing, and the beneficial nature of percentile damage buffs to crit
potential DoT classes. Take, for example, a move that hits for 60 000
- a 100% damage buff presumably adds another 60 000 (not actually
that simple). On the other hand, a move that hits for 60 000 in three
parts will get that 100% damage buff three times to 20 000, which
also adds up to 60 000, but gives three extra chances for crits. If
the first 60k burst doesn't crit, then just a single tick crit in the
three segmented 60k will result in higher damage.

Basically,
what I'm saying is that because survivals single target potential is
still fairly good, the nature of its DoTs being able to crit makes
damage buffs favour survival in the long span of things. The actual
math of such occurrences won't be as simple as I made it out,
nor may it even apply since the specs don't do similar amounts of
damage per move set (chimera, explosive shot and kill command all hit
for different values), but I hope you understand my logic a
bit nonetheless.

Good
throughput on Ji-Kun is going to depend on how good you are at
maintaining your primal nutriment buff and making the best of it
while you have it. Survival is the most forgiving in this regard, and
also will ensure that you have the most success at clearing out your
nests.

Once
again, recommending Survival.

DURUMU

Durumu
is a different beast entirely. And when I say beast, I mean it'll
favour beast mastery. Even if you're focusing REALLY, REALLY HARD on
avoiding the maze during death beam, your pet isn't going to care. It
will happily continue focusing Durumu down while you run around. On
the other hand, Marksmen and Survival hunters will probably see some
sort of downtime distraction during this phase.

The
same holds true during the tri-beam phase, where target swapping will
be annoying for anyone besides the beast master. Recommend leaving
the pet on the boss for the tri-beam phase, the down time for running
isn't really worth it unless you're struggling to kill adds. Which
you shouldn't be due to their low, low health pool. Generally issue
in this phase comes from other huddles.

I
will probably continue using Marksmanship for Durumu, but recognize
that I'd have better throughput as Beast Mastery. Depending on the
usefulness of Marksmanship in heroics and with higher gear sets,
especially without the t14 bonus, I may reforge back to a BM/SV setup
and weep sad tears for marksmanship once more.

PRIMORDIUS

While
Durumu seemed to favour beast mastery, Primordius seemed to favour
marksmanship. Sure, it's nice to sit on him as survival and just spam
multishot onto everything around it, but that doesn't really matter
if the adds aren't actually dying. Each spawn point is too far away
to AoE, and you want them dead before they're in range of other
things so you can pick up the mutation buffs. As BM or Marksmanship,
you can kill your own adds without issue, even if you didn't catch
them right at their spawn point. The faster single target you sink
into adds, the faster you can sink single target damage
into Primordius.

That
said, the disadvantage to beast mastery is how dependant you are on
having your pet with you for that single target focus. It looks like
the pets are getting the fully mutated buff, but I'm not actually
sure about if it's seeing any noticeable increase. As a
marksman, you don't need to wait for your pet to catch up to do half
your damage. I recommend making sure you get a mutated buff as soon
as possible to get onto Primordius before he is out of Careful Aim
phase. If you let someone else go before you, you're wasting the 75%
crit marksman hunters get by not fully utilizing your first 2 minute
mutation buff with CA.

----

The
second set of four bosses is a mixed bag. For the most part you can
continue playing as Survival, and will definitely want to be survival
for Ji-Kun. If you're a BM/SV mix, you will probably want to play BM
for Megaera, Survival for Ji-Kun, BM for Durumu and Survival for
Primordius. Again, Survival is just overall easier to play. Any time
you see multiple targets, your throughput will increase being
Survival. However, if adds are not an issue and you feel you can play
your single target spec up to par, then you may as well switch for
the extra single target focus. '

If
you're a MM/SV mix, you'll probably want to play MM for Megaera,
survival or marksman for Ji-Kun depending on what you're having the
most difficulty with (if your adds are fine and you're bad at
timing primal nutriment marksmanship is an okay choice; still
recommend survival nonetheless). Then marksmanship for both Durumu
and Primordius. Once again, the standard deviation for Survival is
lower and far more forgiving.

The
final bosses of the tier are Dark Animus, Iron Qon, Twin Consorts and
Lei Shen.

----

DARK ANIMUS

Again,
the same as Primordius - it's nice to cleave around you and pad and
have fancy numbers, but you don't actually want to AoE down a whole
bunch of adds (or maybe you have some strange strategy and you do; in
which case nevermind). I saw this fight primarily as a single target
burn with a few smaller adds that I'd have to help with in between
allowing myself to be the target of matter swaps.

So
once you have Dark Animus activated, whatever is going to let you
patchwerk him the best is what you want to be. Marksmanship and Beast
Mastery's potential seems very, very similar to me here, while
Survival will do slightly less but have an easier play style.

IRON
QON

Four
phases, each at about equal length. The only thing that will really
interrupt your playing is the tornadoes. Your pet should still be
able to hit him. A rough estimation of the three specs for Iron Qon,
right now, is at about 100k SV, 110k MM, 115K BM, after taking into
consideration the number of statistics provided for data. The only
deviation regarding skill will be between marksman and BM, whereas SV
is easiest to play but still not coming out on top. Once again, your
choice will be what you can play best, favouring either BM or MM as
your single target.

If
you get slowed from the third phase, you can use Master's Call to
clear it. Deterrence will be your best friend if you're bad at
tornadoes. Disengaging is safe if you're going forward to the stage,
but I kept walking myself into a tornado when we swapped to go the
other direction. Don't be brain dead like me! I sabotaged my uptime.

TWIN
CONSORTS

Exactly
the same story as Iron Qon, except in two phases rather than four.
This will give marksman slightly longer to take advantage of Careful
Aim with its buffs up and give more leeway to execution. I was killed
when I did this fight and feel that I easily would've done the same
amount or more damage as Beast Mastery. Once again, your choice will
be what you can play best, favouring either BM or MM as your single
target. If you're worried about any mechanics or messing up, SV is
still a safe choice. Beyond spreading out, this is more or less just
a burn for us.

LEI
SHEN

Lei
Shen is a fun fight, and it does have some AoE mechanics, but for the
most part they are inconsequential. If you want to look like you have
crazy amounts of damage, then go ahead and spec Survival. If you're
having trouble killing ball lightning, then it's a valid choice
regardless.

The
AoE on MM and BM seems efficient enough to handle it, though, while
providing more single target focus onto Lei Shen. I feel single
target on Lei Shen is more important, especially if you're trying to
push him before he uses certain abilities. I didn't play perfectly
but was able to push 96K into just Lei Shen, focusing a bit more
heavily on helping with Ball Lightning despite being Marksmanship
than otherwise was necessary (24k). In contrast, the highest ranked
BM hunter with a similar timestamp put 91k onto Lei Shen and 17k into
ball lightning, with the highest ranked SV hunter with
a similar timestamp putting 96K into Lei Shen and 37k into
ball lightning.

So,
ultimately, once again, they are all very close. There is
significantly more data for Survival than the other two specs, and
therefore, while the specific numbers I provided makes it look like
survival will do just as much or more single target while also
providing more AoE burst, it's my opinion that the marksmanship and
BM hunters could play better than they did and easily surpass the 96k
performance - while, on the other hand, I feel survival will be stuck
along that plateau.

----

The
final four bosses of the tier, then, are all primarily single target
and will favour whichever of the three specs you feel you're best at
playing. Beast Mastery will be the easiest to maintain strong single
target with, while Marksmanship should perform just as equally or
slightly better if played particularly well (which is hard to do,
especially at this gear level). Survival is a good fall back point
because it will still have its uses, especially on Lei Shen, and can
keep up pace with the other two specs single target. Played at an
equal level it will be a downgrade, but played at a better level than
you'd play the other two you'll see an increase.

TLDR
summary:

If
you're an orc, you're going to want to stay BM/SV.

If
you're a troll, you're probably still going to want to stay BM/SV,
but you have the option of also playing as MM/SV. The latter can
perform just as well, but is more difficult.

You
will absolutely want to keep survival and will see use out of it any
time there is more than one target. Your decision will be based on
which of the targets is more important: multiples or a singular.

I'm
going to keep running with Marksmanship as long as I can to see how
it's shaping up in comparison, but I'm worried about its longevity.
The downsides to the playstyle isn't made up for in its throughput,
especially considering BM/SV share similar reforge needs
(crit>mastery) while MM/SV does not (crit>haste vs survivals
crit>mastery).

The synapse springs, yes. Synapse Springs, Blood Fury and Bestial Wrath all have the same cooldown, allowing BM hunters to pop them all at the same time basically every time. Beast Mastery is all about whack-a-mole stacking cooldown alignments.Synapse Springs will benefit all the hunter specs greatly as well, it just shares the convenience of the other cooldowns for BM.

Make sure your settings and shot priority are set up correctly for each spec. You'll also then want to make sure that your reforging correctly, as marksmanship will be heavily affected by its haste plateaus while beast mastery won't.

The quickest way I can think of to check this is to open FemaleDwarfs public settings, load in Lokricks sim for whitefyst (as it's settings are all set correctly already). Once that's loaded, click "Armory Import", type in your character name/server and make sure that "ONLY LOAD GEAR" is selected. After it's loaded in your gear, you should click the Race/Professions tab, fix the professions to what yours actually are and run the sim. After, switch the race to troll and run the sim again.

If you're still getting the same results, I'd like to hear back so I can take a look and see too. I have quite a few heroic T14 items, so it's entirely possible that lower gear levels don't have the haste / secondary stat requirement to support Marks.

Is this you?I popped you into FD with the method above and simmed you several hundred higher as troll. Remember as troll that you don't need quite as much expertise. I removed the reforge from your boots (haste->expertise) before I simmed. Wasn't quite the difference I saw race swapping, but nonetheless.

Yea that's me.Thanks for the settings, forgot all about whitefys.Believed I used his settings in Fireland days for MM. Using his settings I came up almost 300 dps increase as a troll with the removing reforge in my boots. The thing is most of the gear in 5.2 has a lot of haste , reaching 18.58 haste cap wont be problem with heroic gear. So far the fights I done well in MM has been Ji-Kun( mind you I was not on egg duty), durmu(with shooting on move can still do good damage), dark aminus, Iron Qon, and twins.

Im not sure if going troll especially when you start getting heroic gear it be worth the switch since only half the fights are better for surv. Have to wait and see.Add me to battle net Mannyfresh#1260

I'm not convinced that you are correct about crit's favouring survival for Ji-Kun. You're correct of course that the DOT's can crit separately on each of their applications. Thus, a DOT that fires off three separate bits of damage has a separate crit chance for each of the three pieces.

However, the percentage of damage which gets a crit addition should be the same as it is for BM/MM. Let's say a SV hunter does ten DOT shots each of which fires three times. That's 30 firings, but he'll get the same percent (on average) of crits as the BM/MM gets for their ten shots. The crits will be distributed differently but should work out to the same percentages. Unless I am completely misunderstanding the crit mechanic.

I personally don't care much for survival. I find it much less fun than the other specs. So I'm sticking with a BM/MM mix for now, we'll see how it plays out.

Also while it is true that SV does good AOE damage against bunched mobs, it does less damage against lots of adds coming at different points and times (for example the blood drop adds - can't really AOE those, and cooldowns mean SV can't apply their DOTs as frequently as MM can fire off their specialities). I'd honestly say for taking down lots of spread-apart adds, MM might be the best, although I haven't run numbers on this - no reliance on long-cooldown DOT and less reliance on a running pet means the MM can just stand there and snipe everything as it appears. BM has to rely on the pet to charge around, and SV will often find their cooldowns highly inconveniently timed relative to the new adds (when the adds are too far apart in space and time to try AOEing them).Ethniu#1199 Wyrmrest Accord

Haha, I can't stand Survival. I fall asleep at the wheel from how mindlessly boring it is. I wish they'd left in the proc differences on LnL between black arrow and explosive trap.

You're right for the most part - the SV and the MM hunter will have the same amount of crit percent and the same crit addition. However, the shot count won't be static - under Primal Nutriment either or wouldn't just have, for example, ten shots. Rather, the SV and MM will have the same crit percentage, but the SV hunter will have more chances to proc due to higher numbers of shots being fired (or ticked). For example, 20% crit applied to five casts of explosive shot (15 ticks) versus 20% crit applied to five casts of chimera shot works out to 3 crit ticks and only 1 crit chimera. It's pennies in the long run, but then you also have to consider that it's not just special shots vs special shots. All of SVs damage comes from ticking DoTs, and are hitting harder (my serpent sting ticks an average 18k ish as MM and 28k as SV).

They DO add up to the same damage increase, but a luckier string of procs is ultimately going to favour SV. The primal nutriment buff is only up for 30 seconds, so basically, if an SV hunter gets a LnL proc (which they will) they're already at an advantage in special shots. Both get the same 100% damage increase at the same crit rate, but it comes down to who gets the best optimization out of those 30 seconds. Since it's mostly random, the success rate favours the one getting the most "chances" in.

As for AOE against spread out mobs ... Well, I wouldn't really call it AoE at that point. If an SV hunter can't multishot the set then neither can a marksman hunter. AoE doesn't just mean "lots of mobs", it means "area of affect", so there has to be a particular area that is being affected -- aka, clumping up. Barrage is really the only counter point to lots of mobs that are spread out, otherwise it'll wind up being single target pick offs. That said, in single target, it makes far more sense that the single target specs (MM/BM) will be better :)

The 5.3 buffs to bombardment and beast cleave are fun, though. Not the same burst as SV, but I've yet to do any serious research as to how the length of targets lifespans affects the differences yet.

If you have two specs that do the same damage over time without crits, and you then crit the same percentage of their damage ticks (on average), then on average their damage is the same. I'm not sure I see where these 'pennies' in the long run are coming from?

However, the one who rolls for fewer ticks (in this case MM) will have a much higher standard deviation. That means MM is likely to 'get lucky' and also to 'get unlucky' much more frequently than SV does. SV will consistently do about the same amount of damage.

True enough! SV will consistently do about the same amount of damage in just about any situations. It's definitely the safest of the specs.

In this situation, the pennies and situation comes out of the primal nutriment buff only lasting 30 seconds. So in a 30 second time span whoever has the most shot throughput is the one who will do the most damage. A survival hunter has a higher chance of getting lucky in the 30 second time span, not because of its crit rate, but because of its proc rate. For example, the MM might crit all his Chimeras, but the SV might get three LnL procs. Even if all of those don't crit, it's still going to be more throughput. Not A LOT of throughput, but still :)

It'll also depend on how much each ability is hitting. For example, my average explosive shot on council is a 32k hit and a 64k crit. My average chimera on megaera is 110k hit and 254k crit. On a LnL proc, that explosive round is 96k-192k. If we pretend there's a 30 second interval comparing those numbers, and we assume none of the attacks crit, there will be 3 chimera shots for 330k or 5 explosive shots for 160k. Each LnL proc therein adds another 96k to the survival hunter, so to exceed 330k hits from 160k you would only need two LnL procs. Basically, if an SV hunter has its BA coming off cooldown at the same time as its picking up the primal nutriment, it'll fit more bang for buck into those 30 seconds presuming they have the same crit luck.

Assuming the 100% damage increase is factored in after so they both increase from 110 and 32 to 220 and 64, it's the exact same damage ratio - though both shots are calculated differently, so that might not be the case. Basically, Chimera is based off ranged weapon damage plus 1558 while explosive is based off ranged attack power added to 385 with a multiplier of 0.3, so does that 100% damage increase statically to the actual result or dynamically increase to the 1558 / 385 in the ability equation? A 100% damage increase that is done dynamically will affect abilities differently if they're based on different sources, such as Explosive and Chimera are (weapon damage vs ap). I actually don't know, but I don't feel it's really going to matter much since they're all so close regardless.